de Blob (Blue Tongue Entertainment, 2008)

Scott J. Knight & Jeffrey E. Brand, 'History of Game Development in Australia', Australian Centre for the Moving Image:

There is a powerful perception that the role of Australian film and television is to tell Australian stories and reflect Australian culture. This idea is manifested in government funding for Australian projects and forms of legislation such as screening quotas to preserve Australian content. Games however, have escaped this mandate and are directed at an international audience. Within games themselves, characters and spaces, language and iconography rarely focus on Australian stories and Australian identity. There are many reasons for this but primarily videogames focus on an international market and developers' relationships with international publishers.

Chris Mosely (CEO of Red Tribe) says his company doesn't market itself as an Australian game developer. "We're part of the international game development community," he explains. "We don't really see ourselves as an 'Australian Developer' although we are physically based in Australia. Of course we are patriotic and care about Australian development as a whole, but it would be unwise to ignore the fact that it's a global industry and it's globally competitive. Our standards are set by international criteria."

Ladislav Bielik, The Bare-chested Man in front of the Occupier's Tank, August 21, 1968

Read more about the image and its maker—a fascinating story—here.

Manny Farber, Rohmer's Knee, 1982

Manny Farber, 'White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art' (1962), Negative Space:

Good work usually arises where the creators seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything. A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'They Drive by Night: The Criticism of Manny Farber', JonathanRosenbaum.com:

By situating the movie on neither a screen nor a blackboard but inside a critic's overactive head, Farber obliges it to mingle with its immediate neighbors as well as some of its distant cousins, and what emerges from this mingling often has more to do with the world and its complexity—above all, as we experience it—than any close analysis of whether an actress was sucking her thumb or smoking a cigarette in a particular shot (one of [Robin] Wood's examples [of Farber making an error when noting visual detail]). Faced with such an image, Faulkner might have theoretically gotten the detail wrong as well. But what he would have had to say about the image he wound up with might well have mattered more than whether it was accurate or not.

To write criticism that places itself beyond verification or challenge is to define criticism as an art, not a science, and to define that art in terms of art rather than scientifically. Exercised on its own terms, without reference to business or scholarship, such a practice defies the use of pull-quotes and advertising blurbs as much as term papers and dissertations; it usually becomes impossible, in fact, to appropriate or adapt it for any purposes other than its own. Refusing to reach for final conclusions about anything—the ultimate aim of marketplace and university criticism alike—it can only revel and luxuriate in its own activity, hoping at best merely to keep up with rather than master the art that it engages.

Graeme Blundell, 'The Alchemist', The Australian:

Most Australian directors remind [Barrie] Kosky of small-town traffic cops, "moving people mindlessly across the stage in provincial parades of gobsmacking mediocrity".

The biggest problem facing our theatre, he argues, is not funding or the box office. "The problem is director drought. Ask any of the good actors or designers in the country," he says soulfully. "(Most) directors have no idea about space; no idea about the actor's body; no idea of rhythm; no idea of the contrapuntal movement of body, sound, light and image; and no idea about why the f..k they want people to buy a ticket and sit through an evening of their work."

At the heart of this malaise, he believes, is Australian theatre and film culture's deep suspicion of the auteur. "They think them too clever by half, too smart for their own good ... It's ultimately about the Aussie fear of appearing stupid: 'I don't get it, so therefore I don't like it.' Whereas I don't want to get it; I want to get in it and seek to understand it."

As he warms to his theme, Kosky speaks mournfully, with a sense of resignation rather than a reformer's sense of mission.

"You just don't see contradiction on the stages; it's as if we have a pathological fear of complexity," he says of leaden productions and safe direction. He says, too, he is saddened by the lack of cultural context in theatre.

"It's just not possible to have a willing, excited dialogue between the stage and the audience; everything is so passive," he says. In Germany he is involved in a continuing communication with other artists, companies and even critics, all of it willing and often animated.

"We have so few cultural traditions here though and almost no context for what we do, and it is really deathly if the audience (members) are not excited participants in the dialogue between the stage and that space where the audience is."

Mike Walsh, 'Running on Empty', RealTime:

It is an oft-repeated observation that few Australian filmmakers watch many movies. Certainly we have rarely embraced the examples of Godard, Truffaut, Fassbinder or even Tarantino in having a tradition of cinephiles becoming filmmakers in this country. Mark Hartley's recent Not Quite Hollywood has to import an American, Tarantino, as the most articulate defender of Australian film history.

[...]

Like a schizophrenic who has no sense of how her words will be received, Australian films too often need to prove their professional expertise by doing everything themselves, putting everything on the page in script development, with the result that they become badly overdrawn. Where The Castle managed to get away with its satire of the outer suburban lower middle class, the impression you get from Ten Empty is that the filmmakers look down on the suburban types they can only signify through theatrical caricature. Why else would you put a line like "It's such a nice marinade on the aubergine" in a character's mouth?

This One's for the Fauves (Belinda Davis, 2008)

For my friends in Queensland, a must-see.

The Hayloft Project: Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind, directed by Simon Stone

Red Stitch Actors Theatre: Pool (No Water) by Mark Ravenhill, directed by Simon Stone. Set by Peter Mumford, lighting by Danny Pettingill, music by Xana Chambers. With David Whiteley, Dion Mills, Jessamy Dyer, Melissa Chambers. Red Stitch Actors Theatre. Season ended.

The Hayloft Project and B Sharp: Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind, directed by Simon Stone. Set by Adam Gardiner, lighting by Niklas Pajanti, sound by Hamish Michael. With Amanda Falson, Angus Grant, Katie-Jean Harding, Ben Hjorth, Aaron Orzech, Russ Pirie, Edwina Wren. Belvoir Street Downstairs Theatre. Season ended.

Was I being a contrarian for the sake of contrariness? One of my companions, the short one, said I was. The other, the handsome devil with the ponytail, was not so sure. The three of us had just endured The Hayloft Project's A Soldier's Tale, the upstart company's third and, in my opinion, weakest effort since they burst onto Melbourne's theatre scene a little over a year ago. While the company's debut production of Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening was for my money one of the stand-out productions of last year, and while its much-anticipated follow-up, Chekhov Re-Cut: Platonov, remains for more of my money one of the stand-outs of this one, its co-production with Orchestra Victoria of Stravinsky's curious foray into musical theatre seemed to me a misstep. It was almost as though someone other than The Hayloft's Simon Stone had tried to imitate what The Hayloft and Stone had already accomplished. What had made Spring Awakening and Platonov so vital had here been transformed into formula: take an alternative classic, cut it up where necessary, put it out to pasture on a site-specific set, and the glowing reviews will write themselves. The Hayloft Project, it seemed to me, had gone from strength to strength to parodying itself.

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Frogbattleship and Griffin Stablemates: Stoning Mary by Debbie Tucker Green, directed by Lee Lewis

Griffin Theatre: Don't Say the Words by Tom Holloway, directed by Matthew Lutton. Dramaturgy by Peter Matheson, set by Adam Gardner, lighting by Paul Jackson, sound by Kelly Ryall. With Jack Finsterer, Anna Lise Phillip, Brett Stiller. SBW Stables Theatre until July 26. Bookings: 1300 306 776

Frogbattleship and Griffin Stablemates: Stoning Mary by Debbie Tucker Green, directed by Lee Lewis. Costumes by Alice Babidge, lighting by Luiz Pampolha, produced by Stella Carmody, Brett Boardman. With Christian Barratt-Hill, Adam Booth, Rachael Coopes, Shaun Goss, Emma Jackson, Amanda Maple Brown, Annie Maynard, Sam North, Patrick Richards, Adam Roberts, Sophie Ross, Yael Stone, Chris Tomkinson, Steve Vasquez. SBW Stables Theatre. Season ended.

A shorter version of the Don't Say the Words review appeared in The Australian.

Tom Holloway's Don't Say the Words and Debbie Tucker Green's Stoning Mary belong to that increasingly popular genre of dystopic, post-Western civilization 'what-if?'s. What if Africa's AIDS epidemic reached Britain and our children were drafted as rebel soldiers? What if stoning women to death was a perfectly acceptable form of punishment? What if a solider returned from Iraq to a fallen Western city only to be murdered by his wife? It's a category with a long tradition and one which is currently enjoying some time in the sun. While Hollywood has given us V for Vendetta (which graphic novels gave us first) and Children of Men, and literature has given us Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road, the theatre has given us works such as Philip Ridley's Mercury Fur and, now, Don't Say the Words and Stoning Mary.

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...than download very old videoblogs?

Via Alifeleti Brown.